Unwanted Neighbours The Mughals, the Portuguese, and their Frontier Zones

Had the Mughals returned to their native Kabul at the time of Akbar and they would have not met the Portuguese; ultimately, the events underpinning this book would never have come to pass and neither would have the book. Instead, Akbar and his successors chose to make of Hindustan their 'garden', giving the empire an unexpected southern as well as maritime configuration. By the middle of the seventeenth century the Mughal embrace to the Portuguese spanned thousands of kilometres from Sind to Bijapur, with a supplementary eastern arm in faraway Bengal.

Unwanted Neighbours delves into the ways in which the Portuguese understood and dealt with their frontier zones with Mughal India between c. 1570 and c. 1640. Indeed, a number of evolving geopolitical situations from Thatta to Chittagong required varied approaches from Goa and Lisbon; the arduous management of diverse frontier environments of Mughal India by a European power on the ground lies at the heart of this book and is thoroughly studied for the first time. Differently from most works on Mughal-Portuguese interactions, Unwanted Neighbours focusses on politics, geo-strategy, borderland management, spatial conceptions, imperial projects, and cross-cultural circulation.

Unwanted Neighbours investigates the interactions between the Portuguese in India and the undesirably close Mughals by placing frontier zones and borderlands front and centre. The book addresses the long, complex, and unequal relationship between a continental Muslim empire that was expanding into South India while often looking back to Central Asia, and a European Christian, mostly maritime empire whose rulers did not hesitate to consider themselves 'kings of the sea'.

Jorge Flores, Professor, Earlt Modern Global Histroy at the European University Institute, Florence

Note to the Reader
Prologue
List of Abbreviations
1. Un-neighbourly Empires
2. Chessboard Politics between Central Asia and the Arabian Sea
3. Gujarat: Borderland Experiments I
4. Gujarat: Borderland Experiments II
5. The Deccan Wall
6. Bengal, an Eastern 'Far West'
Bibliography
Index
About the Author